The Cycle Of Abuse – Review Of Hit-Girl #5

[Ed. note – Attention any vigilantes whose crime fetish is knocking out rampant spoiler bombs: I have a taser, a panic room, and a crate of whiskey. Do your worst.]
I have to admit that, although I was a big fan of Mark Millar’s Wanted, when the original Kick-Ass dropped back dropped back in 2008, I didn’t scramble to read it. In fact, it took renting the movie version, or possibly stumbling across it on cable, I don’t know – I drink, what can I say, and Chloë Moretz’s star turn as Hit-Girl, to really draw me in. Sure, the put upon nerd who turns vigilante thing had been done to death, but the little girl who just wanted to please her dad to the point of psychosis? That was new. That wasn’t a sulky teenager with a vainglorious mom like Silk Spectre, involved in the family business because it was expected. This was a young child who’d developed an amazing – and terrifying – skill set. Hit-Girl worshiped her father and he seemed to love the hell out of her right back, with both parties oblivious – in this story about serving justice to criminals – that dad was a perpetrator of systematic, pervasive child abuse.

Don’t believe me? Read Hit-Girl #5.

Casualties of Reboot: DC Cancels More Books, Shifts More Creative Teams

It has been 17 months since DC blew up their entire line of comics, shuffled all their creators around to different books, and blew up their entire history of continuity. You know, for everyone except Grant Morrison, who has been allowed to continue his Batman saga that started several years ago in Batman Incorporated like it’s still 2009… or sometimes, considering all the Silver Age characters Morrison’s shoveled into that storyline, like it’s still 1959.

And the New 52 reboot was an unqualified success. It put DC over Marvel, in both sales numbers and dollar earnings, for the first time. It refreshed the classic characters of the DC Universe for a new generation. Truly, those 52 books signalled the start of a thousand-year uncontested reign. Nothing could stop them. They would march to victory on a road of bones. They would drive their enemies before them, see them broken, and hear the lamentations of…

What’s that? DC’s cancelling six more books?

Whoops.

Eight Angry Men: New Avengers #3 Review

It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a month since Jonathan Hickman debuted his Marvel Now reboot of New Avengers, to generally good reviews, and, well, this one:

Christ, he thinks he’s making movies. That’s why I wasn’t completely satisfied by Avengers #1, and was actually kinda pissed off by New Avengers #1: they’re not really stories.

Yeah, it didn’t do a hell of a lot for me. Hickman started New Avengers in a way that felt like a movie trailer: a tease of a terrible, world-shattering apocalypse to occur at some point in the future, with a final assembly of heroes to combat this purely theoretical threat in heroic establishing shots with explanatory and expository slogans, followed by a team shot… all without a hell of a lot actually, you know, happening. All it was missing was some deep baritone growling, “In a world…” and an immediately-following commercial for Doritos. It was such a blatant setup for story versus actual story that it actually made me kind of angry.

That, however, was a month ago. This week, we have New Avengers #3, and the Illuminati is actually in a position to face the terrible, world-shattering apocalypse. So now that it’s here, how was it? Well, the downside is that the actual confrontation is, on the scale of action sequences, less the last ten minutes of the Avengers movie and closer to the last time I was shitfaced and tried to get the TV remote to jump to my hand using telekenisis. The good news is that, despite the somewhat anticlimactic action sequence, it features a hell of a lot of damn fine character work. And while there isn’t a lot of action, there is plenty of conflict. Some damned entertaining conflict, as a matter of fact.

Resignation: Minutemen #6 Review

“Such sad music. The saddest thing I can imagine…

Ironically, I’d spent the last week editing my book for the sake of my old friends…I gave everyone what they wanted: a sunny remembrance. I realized that carrying all that horror inside me was a small price to pay…

The book was a smash and because it was the only real accounting of our careers, it became the truth…

…’It’ll never be like it was when it was new, but there’s still plenty of life in this old baby.'”

-Hollis Mason, Minutemen #6

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to work at DC Comics in 2013.

There you are, at one of the inarguable pinnacles of the comic book industry. You’re working for one of the Big Two, making the best page rates available in the American comics industry, working on some of the highest profile books there are. You never have to buy your own drinks at any comic convention in the civilized world, and thousands upon thousands of aspiring creators envy you your day-to-day existence… and yet it is, where the rubber hits the road, a job. You have a boss, and you call him and he or she tells you what you are going to be working on, and you have a choice: you either do it, regardless of how inane or Sisyphean your assigned task is… or you don’t, and hope that you can keep working in your little niche without being singled out and fired.

Put on top of that the particular an individual realities of DC Comics today: you work for a company that, less than 18 months ago, blew up the underpinnings of all their books in the interest of saving them, despite being only a year or so out of Blackest Night, which put more asses in DC Comics’s panels at San Diego Comic-Con than I’d ever seen before. And since that demolition, the company has busily spent its time examining every element of those new books under a microscope, reportedly making last-minute changes and nitpicks every step of the way, causing several high-profile creators to defect to Marvel. Management has mandated new directions and has then apparently fired people when the new directions are seemingly not the right new directions, with boss-favorite creators being given the assignments in the aftermath… and all of it under the daily direction of Bob Harras, the Editor In Chief who was Marvel’s Editor In Chief during the late 1990s. So you’re working under the sure and steady hand of a man committed to raising sales at any cost – and if that cost is cancelling a book, revamping any character, or demanding a crossover, character rape or supporting character murder, so be it… all while in the back of your head, you’re hearing things like, “Clooonnnneeeee Sagaaa…. Chrooooommmiummmm covvverrrrss…”

Now let’s imagine you are one of the creators assigned to the Before Watchmen project: a project that almost no one in comics fandom wanted, if they weren’t actively opposed to it. A project that, by its very existence, implied a comic publisher that was willing to actively and enthusiastically fuck over one of its (former) A-List creators in the interest of making a little money right fucking now, long term consequences be damned. And let’s say you are asked to work on one of these Before Watchmen books while employed by a company where you can see your fellow creators being fired by email, or having their books yanked to make an opening so that one of the Golden Boys can write a book starring fucking Vibe: what do you do?

Well, if you’re Darwyn Cooke, you write a final issue of Minutemen where the narrator makes a terrible mistake, writes the truth about it as best he can while allowing himself to be bullied into severely editing himself for the good of the people around him, and makes the decision to walk away from the whole mess, so that the people foolish enough to follow him can have their chance at things.

I might be – hell, I probably am – reading too much into Minutemen #6, but as a comic book? It could make one hell of a resignation letter.

Armored Gladiators, And Also Football: Iron Man 3’s Extended Look Trailer

Given that Crisis On Infinite Midlives is based in Boston, it was difficult for us to escape the pervasive malaise that surrounds a Super Bowl that doesn’t include the New England Patriots. Combine the lack of the home team with the fact that co-Editor Amanda and I generally look forward to the Super Bowl only as a bellwether that we are only days away from pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training, and that football enthusiasts were the ones most likely to smack our copies of The Dark Knight Returns our of our hands in the halls of high school (all while guffawing in a manner that implied that high school somehow mattered, and that its social pyramid would go unchanged in the future, and that there wasn’t a chance in hell that someday you’d be gone to fat and earning your keep by rotating the tires on my expensive sports car, right, 1987 starting linebacker Jeff Chander, of 228 North Thompson Avenue?), and we just weren’t all that into the experience.

So here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, we spent the game as an excuse to drink beer and read – Amanda Jim Butcher’s new Dresden Files book Cold Days, and myself Paul Tobin’s prose superhero story (and, ironically, elegy for lost high school relationships) Prepare To Die! – with the game on in the background so we could occasionally look up and marvel that the truly shitty electrical engineering skills at play in a city best known for binge drinking, and at the commercials.

Specifically, we wanted to see the new commercial for and attendant new footage from Iron Man 3, as did every other red blooded comic book fan, both young and old enough to have grown up associating the sound of football pads crashing with the instinct to clench the ol’ buttocks against potential wedgies. And Marvel Studios delivered… albeit using the modern irritation of only showing a bit before teasing the masses to their Facebook page for more visual goodness in exchange for a cheap “like.” And if there’s one thing you don’t want to try with an older geek, it’s playing the sounds of football followed immediately by the command, “Now say that you like it!”

So to hell with the official channels; we have obtained the “extended look” trailer for Iron Man 3, and you can check it out too, right after the jump.

Digital Rioting: San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Tickets On Sale February 16th

As we speak, we are watching the Super Bowl, taking place at the Super Dome in New Orleans and packed with people who spent a great deal of money and endured extreme personal hardship to attend in person.

Those poor dupes are rank amateurs. As anyone who had ever tried to attend San Diego Comic-Con knows. And will soon relearn. Because the sales of passes to the general public for SDCC 2013 starts at noon Eastern Time on Saturday, February 16th…

…and if history is any guide, will be sold out by 2 p.m. on February 16th.

Extreme Violence, And Also Football: World War Z Super Bowl Trailer Leaked

The Super Bowl is tomorrow, which means that a large part of the population of the United States will be gathering in living rooms, taverns and bars to get shitfaced on generic American beer and watch television commercials. Rumor has it that there might also be a football contest.

Seriously: nobody gives a tin tinker’s damn about the football game tomorrow unless you live in San Francisco or Baltimore, and even then you probably don’t care because you’re too busy seeking the company of men, ducking bullets from the guns of drug dealers, or both of the above. Let’s face it: we’re in it for the commercials, and even most of those we don’t care about. After all, we will already be drinking Budweiser products, and one Internet domain name registrar is much the same as another despite he magnificence of Danika Patrick’s breasts.

Frankly, we’re in it for the teaser trailers for the summer blockbusters – to this day I remember when our contributor Trebuchet called me during the game to ask me if I’d seen the ad for a previously-unknown flick called The Matrix – and to be honest, who wants to sit there for three hours just to see thirty seconds of movie footage?

Well, not to worry, because we’ve got you covered. Specifically, the Super Bowl trailer for World War Z has leaked to the Internet, and we have it for you a day before the game. You can check it our after the jump.

Brand New Day: Invincible #100 Review

Editor’s Note: We can’t afford to be innocent. Stand up and face the spoilers.

Over ten years, Invincible has evolved from a book about a teenaged hero learning both his powers and how to balance being a superhero and a high school student, into an experiment in comic superhero universe building. Seriously: this book has gone from a relatively small-scale story about a dude whose dad was basically Superman, fighting small-scale villains like mad bombers blowing up high school kids, to a seriously ambitious epic about interstellar travel, interplanetary war, politics and intrigues across multiple race, numerous superteams, and a pinkish, one-eyed powerhouse named Allen. Okay, some parts were more ambitious than others, but that’s not the point.

The point is that Invincible, over the years, became something that in almost no way resembled what it started out as: a simple superhero book that was pretty reminiscent of early Spider-Man. And as with The Amazing Spider-Man, Invincible has built up a huge amount of continuity that could make the book inscrutable to new readers. Which means that, as with The Amazing Spider-Man, it seems that writer Robert Kirkman has decided that, with Invincible #100, it’s time for a good, old-fashioned reboot.

Unlike The Home Office, Superman Is Unbound

Well, the good news is that professional people with some weird forms of PKE Meters have cleared the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office of any signs of water damage and / or Black Mold. The bad news is that the entire ordeal took a lot more time than I anticipated, and beyond that, now my dreams of chucking the workaday world of comics blogging in favor of a home-grown psilocybin farming business (but I still own the name Boston Baseboard Shrooms! And all it’s subsidiary rights!) have officially gone tits up.

And the worse news is that, even as the Home Office has been cleared for human habitation… yeah, heavy windstorms in Boston have knocked out our Internet. Meaning that we can only do a quick update today, using my aged cell phone as a half-assed Wi-Fi hotspot, in clear violation of my terms of service, and way outside the scope of what the good folks at Westinghouse Electrical Notions and Radio Communication Geegaws intended.

But we do have a bit of news: Warner Bros. has released a teaser trailer for their latest upcoming animated, direct-to-video feature. It’s gonna be Superman: Unbound, and based on a Geoff Johns written and Gary Franks drawn series in Action Comics back in 2008. Now, I’m not the biggest Superman fan in the world, but I have never seen a bad DC animated feature, and this one looks to be just as solid.

The feature’s gonna star the voice talents of Matt Bomer (from White Collar) as Superman and Molly Quinn as Supergirl, And you can check out the trailer after the jump… in theory, assuming my shaky, improvised Internet access holds (and if it doesn’t we’ll fix it when we have more signal).

Sticky Fingers: The Superior Spider-Man #2 Review

Editor’s Note: Let me go wild, like a spoiler in the sun…

The problem with The Superior Spider-Man #2 is the scene. The scene.

You will know The Scene when you see it. In fact, you will have some difficulty unseeing it. And given that Doc Ock is occupying Peter Parker’s body, and given that Ock, a former ugly duckling, is suddenly in the body of a guy that can allow him to do things that he has never been able to do, while not necessarily understanding how to do those things, the scene makes complete and total sense.

And yet The Scene overpowers almost everything else in the issue, and it does it unnecessarily. Sure, it serves a purpose in furthering a main plot point, but it does it in a way where you almost won’t remember the plot point it furthers. The Scene just about turns this issue into the comics equivalent of Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny: do you have any idea what Brown Bunny is about? Of course not, all you know is that Gallo got his cock sucked by Chloe Sevigny on camera.

And we will address The Scene, and how it affects the comic… which, in spite of the scene, gives us more Peter Parker than I would have expected even a month ago, and which finally shows some real signs that maybe, just maybe, Otto Octavius really has some elements to be a superior Spider-Man… and, in some areas, a superior Peter Parker.

You know, if you can get past The Scene.